Electronic monitoring system developed to correct inadequate waste disposal in urban areas
Bruno Suguimoto Iwami, a researcher at Escola Politécnica da USP, explains his patent System for monitoring the disposal of garbage and debris , developed in partnership with professors Jó Ueyama and Francisco Louzada Neto, both from the Institute of Mathematics and Computing Sciences (ICMC) of the USP and support from the USP Innovation Agency (Auspin).
“We are a partnership away from putting it on the market”, announces Iwami. He reports that the group developed each component of the system: processing data from the GPS – the Global Positioning System , satellite navigation system – operation of the identification antenna, among others. “It’s a full plate for us to add artificial intelligence to the system”, he says.
Improper waste disposal
According to him, the idea for the patent came from a dialogue with the City Hall of São Carlos on monitoring the disposal of garbage and debris. In 2022, Brazil produced 81.8 million tons of solid waste, with a collection coverage of 93%. These data are from the 2022 Urban Solid Waste Management Diagnosis , captured by the National Sanitation Information System of the Ministry of Regional Development.
Inadequate disposal of garbage and debris in Brazilian cities has impacts on mobility, housing and basic sanitation. “The project’s proposal is for a system that identifies when a bucket is collected or dumped and whether it is full or empty, then sends this information to a server”, says Iwami. Thus, the system identifies the bucket’s registration number, its coordinates, occupation and dump time, in order to verify that the dump was carried out correctly.
According to the Panorama of Solid Waste in Brazil 2022 , a survey carried out by the Brazilian Association of Public Cleaning and Special Waste Companies (Abrelpe), almost 30 million tons of waste collected in Brazil were disposed of inappropriately, such as dumps and controlled landfills. The disposal of domestic and public waste should not occur in these spaces, according to the National Policy on Solid Waste, sanctioned in 2010, which established the extinction of dumps and irregular landfills.
By controlling the collection and disposal location of the bucket, the technology allows you to monitor how waste is being handled and the geographic distribution of buckets through a web application. “All you need to do is install the system on the collection trucks and stick the identifying stickers on the buckets. After that, everything is done automatically”, points out the researcher.
The promotion of public policies for the proper management of urban solid waste in the country, with a focus on the generation, collection and disposal of these materials, is a key factor in the application of the patent. “I believe that the system will soon be on the market because, in some cities in Brazil, the monitoring of buckets is becoming mandatory and our system foresees a low production cost”. Since 2017, the Municipality of São Paulo has adopted electronic monitoring of buckets to ensure that garbage is disposed of at the correct destination.
The technology behind
He explains that the idea of the patent is its applicability in any type of environment and city. For this, the developers thought of a system that could be easily modified in connection components: “Exchanging the telephony module for a wi-fi module would be very easy to do to serve a city that has a wi-fi signal throughout its entirety. extension and thereby reduce the cost of mobile data”, he exemplifies.
In addition, the system can be used in different numbers of vehicles, in order to serve, simultaneously, small municipalities and metropolises. Iwami comments that the module installed in the vehicles includes other technologies for better use of the product. “We thought about waterproof protection for rainy days and, in the case of the identifiers, we used the same technology for automatic toll collection, which is that set of antenna and sticker that we stick on cars”, he illustrates.